As an IT manager, one of your most valuable possessions is your career. At your firm, you are the only person who is going to be spending any time worrying about your career: how's it going, what is your next step, what could you be doing better? These are all vital questions for you to be able to answer if you want to advance in your career.

What you'll find inside:

• How to protect your it career from sabotage
• What can top athletes teach you about being a better it leader?
• Shh! how to keep your it job search secret...
• IT managers and the secret of the color wheel

We do need to be careful as we manage our careers. Not everyone that we work with may have our best interests in mind. Sabotage is always possible if we are not keeping our eyes open. Stay aware at all times and perhaps even take a look at how top athletes manage their careers in order to better understand what you should be doing.

The job that you have today may not be the job that you'll have tomorrow. That means that at some point in time you'll have to go looking for your next job. Do you know how to go about doing this without screwing up your current job?

None of us is perfect - we all make mistakes. As an IT manager you need to have a plan in place for dealing with the mistakes that you know that you'll eventually make. To make yourself more valuable to the company, you may want to consider getting an executive MBA. Picking a school and a program can be a real challenge.

One of the things that IT managers do a lot of is make presentations. The challenge that we face in doing this is that few of us have ever been trained how to do it effectively. We need to find out how to create better PowerPoint slides. A little bit of help in how to go about selecting the right colors to use wouldn't hurt either.